George Will on 'Climate Change' and In General: When Pols Say 'Debate Is Over,' It Really Means 'They're Losing It'

On Fox News Sunday earlier today, George Will got in some tremendous rips at global warming/"climate change" alarmism.

Although Will's criticism was primarily aimed at politicians, we cannot overlook the fact that their enablers in the establishment press have made their immature "climate denier" and "flat earther" name-calling rants possible by unskeptically allowing their so-called "settled science" to be seen as explanations for Britain's recent floods and California's droughts. President Obama is pushing the drought nonsense, when it's bad man-made water policy which is to blame. Video and the relevant portion of the FNS transcript are after the jump (HT Mediaite; bolds are mine):

PRESIDENT OBAMA (on video): We have to be clear, a changing climate means that weather-related disasters like droughts, wildfires, storms, floods are potentially going to be costlier, and they're going to be harsher.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CHRIS WALLACE: President Obama in drought-ridden California Friday proposing a $1 billion fund to research and help communities deal with the effects of climate change. And we're back now with the panel. Well, the President's case may seem a bit hard to make when the eastern half of the country is in the grips of a brutal winter. But as you heard the President say, climate change accounts for everything from drought to floods. George? Do you buy it?

GEORGE WILL, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: No. And neither does science. But I'm one of those who are called "deniers." And the imputation is that I deny climate change. It would be impossible to state with greater precision the opposite of my view, which is that, of course the climate is changing. It's always changing. That's what gave us the Medieval Warm Period. That's what gave us subsequent to that for centuries the Little Ice Age. Of course it's changing.

When a politician on a subject implicating science, hard science, economic science, social science says "the debate is over," you may be sure of two things. The debate is raging and he's losing it. So I think frankly as a policy question, Chris, Holman Jenkins, Kim's colleague at the Wall Street Journal put it perfectly. The only questions is, how much money are we going to spend? How much wealth are we going to forego creating in order to have zero or discernible effect on the environment?

(LAUGHTER)

As the discussion continued (past the video excerpt above), liberal Kirsten Powers went against her environmentalist pals by point to the truth, which is that the drought conditions in California are the result of politics and not the weather:

WALLACE: Climate change, I think it's fair to say, used to be a very hot topic. No pun intended. In fact, it used to be called global warming now not so much. Kirsten, what happened?

KIRSTEN POWERS, USA TODAY COLUMNIST: I don't know. But it has become very much an article of faith on the left that this is perhaps the biggest threat that the world faces right now. And I think that what Obama is doing is sort of overtly political move here, because there's no way on Earth he's going to get $1 billion out of this Congress to do anything, let alone fight climate change. I would say that the fund is focused on reducing carbon emissions, which whether you believe in climate change or not, I think is something that people should be able to get behind. I mean less pollution is definitely a good thing. So that might be a better way to make the argument rather than claiming that climate change is the cause of every single thing that happens with the weather.

WALLACE: Now as Kirsten pointed out, that this proposal for this climate resilience fund, $1 billion, is going to be part of the president's new budget, which he proposes in March and I think most people would agree has almost no chance of passage. Kim, I want to ask you about your paper, "The Wall Street Journal." They did a poll of 15 pressing issues. What do we need to address? Climate change came in dead last of all of those issues. And some Californians say the lack of water in the Central Valley near Fresno, where the president was, is obviously they have had a drought, but it also is because of state and federal regulations that have kept them from sharing water from the Sacramento Valley, because of an endangered species in fish.

POWERS: Yes. And this is a government exacerbated drought as it were. Because there is water there. There is plenty of water there, and certainly enough water to be providing aid to the farmers who desperately need it at the moment. But as you said, they've been keeping it so that they can flush it down to help endangered smelt. So, and what we've had is Republicans have been desperately trying to address this in the Congress with legislation. Democrats, even California Democrats have blocked that move and the White House has been against it. So what you had is Democratic politicians putting the fish ahead of the farmers.

As Breitbart's Joel B. Pollak noted on February 9, Arizona, where the weather has arguably been just as harsh ("Astonishingly low rainfall. Low snow levels on the mountains. Rivers at two to three percent of normal levels"), is not facing a crisis, because it "has done a superior job of developing water reservoirs for dry years."

Someone ought to ask Obama, California Governor Jerry Brown, and the envirozealots who support them why California won't — not can't, won't — do what Arizona has done.

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